Meet our Reviews Sweepstakes Winner: Thomas of Le Wagon

Table of Contents

• Meet Thomas:
• Want to be our next Reviews Sweepstakes Winner?

Over 1000 coding bootcamp graduates entered our sweepstakes competition to win a $500 Amazon Giftcard just by leaving a review for their school on Course Report. This time, our lucky winner was Thomas from French coding bootcamp Le Wagon! We caught up with him to find out a bit about his coding bootcamp experience and why he decided to attend Le Wagon.

Want to be our next Reviews Sweepstakes Winner? Review your Coding Bootcamp experience here!

Meet Thomas:

Twitter: @serto_tom

Graduation Date: June 2015

What did you do before Le Wagon?

After graduating from my engineering school, I worked for 5 years as a Project Manager in the Intelligent Transport Systems area: I had the chance to work on various innovative projects, mixing new technologies with transportation, mobility and smart cities issues. In 2013, my girlfriend was presented with a great job opportunity in Shanghai. We decided to move there and I was planning to find a job in the tech industry, but Shanghai was not really tech-oriented and I end up learning a bit of Chinese and coaching Squash :)

During this time, I spent some time playing with Android Dev, attending Online Entrepreneurship workshops, and thinking about starting my own business back in France. In 2014 in Paris, I met my business partner and we started working on our startup, OpenLoge.

Why did you attend Le Wagon? 

While working on OpenLoge, a friend of mine introduce me to Le Wagon. I took the 9-weeks bootcamp in order to bootstrap my project, but also more generally in order to add to my product/project manager profile the skillset of a Junior Full-stack Web Developer.

What's your job title today? Where do you work?

Since graduating from Le Wagon, I've started splitting my time in three:

• I spend 20% of my time on OpenLoge (RoR, HTML, CSS, JS, React) as cofounder.
• I spend another third working as a freelance developer. It's great to carry on coding and it's rather a decent way to earn money when your startup is not yet the next unicorn ;)
• I spend the last third with Le Wagon as a Teacher Assistant. I help students working on their exercises and projects, sometimes re-explaining to them some key concepts, sometimes adding extra information. Former students helping new students is a core value of LeWagon and it's a smart way to ease the learning process. Thus, I'm happy to give back and that's also a great way to keep on learning, dealing with new technical and product challenges and to earn money.

Tell us about your new startup, OpenLoge!

OpenLoge helps people find helping hands in their neighborhood for every day "tasks": babysitting, handyman, gardening, welcoming your Airbnb guests, etc. There's a lot of platforms out there doing the same. What we do differently is that we actually find a "team leader" in each neighborhood who builds and manages his/her team of 5 to 15 neighbors ready to help neighbors. At the end of the day, people use our website to ask for a service, discuss the conditions and pay for services; but they can be assured that the people offering their services have been selected and are managed/coordinated by other local neighbors. We end up with more trust and more loyalty :)

What's your advice to someone considering Le Wagon or another coding bootcamp?

JUMP!

Congrats, Thomas! To learn more, read Le Wagon reviews on Course Report or visit the Le Wagon website!

Want to be our next Reviews Sweepstakes Winner?

Review your Coding Bootcamp experience here!